Fusion Vs. Parallels – Fusion clear winner in Benchmark tests

cNet has taken every major option for running Windows on your Mac into the lab and benchmarked the results. What did they find out?

For speed in virtualization, Fusion is the clear winner.

I haven’t run extensive official benchmarks, but even I can tell you that Fusion is much snappier than Parallels when it comes to performance. I’ve been trying out both solutions for the past week, and while neither of them does a terribly good job with Vista at this point, Fusion is – hands down – my favorite of the two, and the reason for that is the speed.

Parallels has some real lag problems from what I’ve seen. It’s a very flashy, Mac-like, application, and all that is well and good, but Fusion – which is a much less flashy program – gets the job done faster, and that makes all the difference to me.

Comments

I preordered Parallels when it was avaialble for $40. I’ve been using Parallels for a year. I have not been blown away with its performance. Especially USB.

I have been trying the Fusion beta since it first came out. I purchased Fusion for $40 when it was avaialble on pre order. Why? Because Fusion blew Parallels out of the water. It looks better, is less buggy, interacts with the hardware (USB) better and is in general more resposive. And looks nicer, too.

Before I switched to the Mac, I used VMWare for years on Windows/Linux without a problem. VMWare is the industry leader. And now that Intel is throwing them millions for R&D, you’d be silly sticking with Parallels.

That’s interesting to hear that Fusion is that much better–seems to me that I remember reading tons of reviews saying not to waste your time with Fusion…I’ll have to try it out for myself. Thanks for posting this, Michael.

I have just tried the 1.1 release of Fusion. I have been using Parallels for the last 9 months. I’ll be changing. Parallels is buggy in full screen mode using spaces – it keeps causing other apps to resize when it changes screen modes – and is way more sluggish. Like most people my experience with Parallels support has also been poor. I never got a reply to any of my support emails. Ever.

You can full screen Fusion in a space and move between it seamlessly. Despite trying I cannot get it to work like this on Parallels. The unity is also smoother then Parallels coherence mode.

Fusion is much closer to the user experience I have come to enjoy as a mac user. The look of fusion is not an issue – I’d take performance over eye candy any day.

I agree. I have been using Parallels 3.0 since December 2007. It is one of the worst pieces of software on the market. It has crashed 3 times. One time, I had to erase and completely reinstall the Mac OS X. I have tried to contact the Parallels support team 4 times to help, but their support is lousy (never responded).